Left To Survive Indir
Odina Conkright
By the end of the year, an estimatedtotal of 1,000 unaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children will haveentered Greece during 2008. Arriving without a parent or adult responsible fortheir care, many have fled countries wracked by armed conflict such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. Some are fleeing persecution, violence, discrimination andexploitation. Others are running from a destiny of poverty and illiteracy. Anunknown number may have been trafficked.
Many will have been caught by the authorities as they enterthe country, sometimes by boat, others as they try to leave for other parts ofthe European Union. Yet others will have been detained by police making sweepsagainst migrants, such as that which took place in Patras at the start of 2008,or in action against street traders or petty criminality. A few will declarethemselves through the process of applying for asylum.
These unaccompanied children are particularly vulnerable toviolence, exploitation and abuse. Yet the official protection and asylumregimes fail them-migrants and asylum-seekers alike. That systemic failure isthe focus of this report.
While Greek legislation recognizes, to an extent, thegovernment's obligations to care for and protect unaccompanied migrantchildren, the situation on the ground is woeful. The police are responsible forvirtually all aspects of immigration and asylum-including the adjudication ofasylum claims in the first instance and the deportation of migrants. Yetchildren (and adult migrants) report being beaten, kicked or slapped by policeofficers and coast guards. One child told Human Rights Watch of being subjectedto a mock execution by a port police officer in Patras. Others reported beingthrown into the sea.
Children are routinely detained, contrary to internationalstandards, sometimes in the same cells as adults. Procedures for assessingtheir age or vulnerability are totally inadequate. Children report arbitraryage assessments.
The inadequacy of identification procedures followed bypolice combined with the lack of trained personnel and interpreters mean thatthere is a serious risk that trafficked children are not recognized as such.One official declared that his detention center did not have any traffickingvictims within it-but there were no interpreters employed at the center and oneof the detainees, an Afghan girl, told Human Rights Watch researchers that shehad not been interviewed since her arrival. One boy described how he would bekept "like a prisoner" by the man who smuggled him if his uncle back home didnot pay the agreed US$6000 smuggling fee. A 16-year-old girl from the Philippines told how she had come to Athens to join "her aunt," taking up a job as a domesticworker.
The guardianship system, the responsibility of juvenile andcourt prosecutors, is dysfunctional. There are no standard proceduresexplaining the mandate of guardians for foreign unaccompanied children, and asa result prosecutors have widely differing views of what their role entails.Some believe that they cannot act on behalf of detained children.
Only a small minority of unaccompanied children ask forasylum no matter how solid their refugee claims. Many believe they have no chancesof receiving refugee status. Indeed, Greece's recognition rate of asylum-seekersafter a first assessment stands at 0.03 percent.
Unaccompanied children who want to apply for asylum in Greece face serious obstacles simply accessing asylum procedures. None of the childreninterviewed by Human Rights Watch, many of whom are illiterate, had been orallyinformed by police of their right to claim asylum. Although the authorities saythat applications from children can be received any day of the week, inreality, unaccompanied children are lined up with hundreds of adults outside thePetrou Ralli police station in Athens each Sunday-the main facility forprocessing asylum claims. Children described waiting in line overnight andreturning six or seven times before finally managing to enter the building.Some told us they gave up trying to file an asylum application. During theasylum interview, few are represented by a guardian or lawyer. Unaccompaniedchildren told of interviews lasting only a few minutes in which key informationabout their situation was not recorded and some were denied the chance toexplain why they left their country of origin or their families.
With only one opportunity to ask for asylum in Europe underthe European Union's Dublin II regulation, once children are released fromdetention in Greece, many attempt to travel onwards to Italy and other EU countries-often a risky and life-threatening journey. In Italy, they may find themselves summarily returned to Greece. Those who travel onwards after theymade an asylum application in Greece may be transferred back under the DublinII regulation that allows EU member states to return any asylum seeker,including unaccompanied children, to the country where they first asked forasylum.
There is a severe shortage of safe accommodation forunaccompanied foreign children. As of November 2008, the Ministry of Healthfunded or co-funded only around 200 places in care institutions. This is farfrom the number needed for children already in the country, much less for thoseexpected to arrive in the months to come-yet the ministry has no plans toextend this provision. There is no specialized center for unaccompanied girlsand no foster family system is available for unaccompanied migrant children.Indeed, the reality is that children who have not asked for asylum have less chanceof accessing a care placement, and finding places for those who are seekingasylum is equally a struggle. The recent opening of a care center for up to 100unaccompanied children on Lesvos Island is an encouraging step. However, as alarge-scale center in an isolated and remote location, it is only adequate as atransit center but not for extended placement.
As a result of the lack of care places, unaccompaniedchildren are typically released from detention with nothing but a deportationorder requiring them to leave the country, but no further assistance. If theyfail to leave the country and do not apply for asylum, or otherwise fail toaccess or fall out of the asylum procedures, they are subject to renewed arrestand detention and at risk of deportation.
Most find themselves without accommodation and thereforesleep in parks, share apartments with adult strangers, or otherwise findovercrowded and squalid accommodation, such as over-crowded "hotels," typicallydecrepit buildings in the center of Athens where spots to sleep on the floor arerented out for three to five euro a night.
Forced to fend for themselves, children struggle daily forsurvival, are out of school and have to search for income as day laborers. As aresult, they are at serious risk of ending up illegally employed inexploitative work, performing heavy and hazardous tasks at risk to theirhealth.
The protection failures documented in this report representthe continuation in 2008 of systemic failures which have led to criticism andconcern expressed by both UN and Greek bodies over many previous years. The UNCommittee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern about the treatment ofunaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children as long ago as 2002. In 2004,the UN Human Rights Committee noted an "absence of child welfare protection."In 2005, the Greek Ombudsman called on the government to identify, register,and provide adequate care to all unaccompanied children in the country-a callbasically repeated by the Greek National Commission for Human Rights in2007.
Suspend all transfers of unaccompanied children to Greece under the Dublin II regulation until such time as Greece's asylum systems and protectionservices for unaccompanied children meet international standards.
Recognize that the European asylum instruments and the Dublin IIregulation do not guarantee sufficient protection for unaccompanied children inthe European Union; start negotiations on a separate and comprehensive legalinstrument for all unaccompanied children in the European Union.
This report addresses the treatmentof unaccompanied children who seek asylum or who migrate to Greece. With the exception of deportations, it does not address unaccompanied children who enter Greece from Albania, as a series of reports by other organizations has been published in the pasteight years on their situation.[1] Neitherdoes this report document conditions in detention or in care centers, which arediscussed in a separate Human Rights Watch report entitled Greece-Stuck in aRevolving Door: Iraqis and other Asylum seekers and Migrants at theGreece-Turkey Entrance Gate to the European Union.Thisreport does not repeat these findings and instead only refers to conclusionsdocumented in the second report.[2]
Research was carried out in Greece from April 14-16 and from May 21 to June 12. Ninety-nine migrants and asylumseekers, among them 53 unaccompanied children, were interviewed-three of them girls.Thirty-seven children were from Afghanistan, 10 were from Somalia, 2 were from Iraq, and the remaining 4 were from Congo-Brazzaville, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Twenty-two children, including all three girls, were below age16, and the remaining were 16 or 17 years old.[3]
Many children did not know theirexact date of birth, and all were told that they could be interviewedregardless of their age. In two cases, we concluded after the interview thatthe persons interviewed were most likely 18 or older; one young-looking girldid not want to tell us her age. We did not count these individuals aschildren.
We conducted a majority ofinterviews with the help of interpreters. We interviewed migrants and asylumseekers in four detention centers and in the following locations: Athens, Volos, Patras, Samos Island, Mitilini, Hagius Andreas.[4] In Athens, we found children with the help of members of migrant communities aswell as through human rights defenders. In Volos, we interviewed unaccompaniedchildren at a care center for boys. In Patras, we interviewed unaccompaniedchildren staying at an informal settlement. We also interviewed childrenshortly after their release from detention in Mitilini, while traveling on aferry to Athens.
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